4 ms·

From the article about Windows: "it’s simply and fundamentally insecure". How is it fundamentally insecure exactly?

by kyberias 14y ago

brudgers 14y ago
By popular perception.
- calinet6 14y ago
  As well as actual reality.
dredmorbius 14y ago
There have been a number of articles / studies on this, the ones I'm largely familiar with in the early aughts / late 90s. It mostly boils down to fundamental architecture, monolithic design, UI decisions, conflating data + code (e.g.: a "Word Document" or "Spreadsheet File" is really a general-purpose computer program, not merely static text), and ingrained user practices (see today's PHP rant for a somewhat parallel discussion of culture), as well as an inherent lack of transparency, a filesystem model which prevents being able to delete in-use files, etc., etc., etc. It's a pile of small faults which, in total, create gross instabilities. Worse: the reasons for this are deeply linked to Microsoft's need to maintain a deep monpolistic lock on the personal computing sector. And as much as Microsoft continue to address small aspects, the big picture eludes them. Empirical data continue to show that Microsoft systems are far more vulnerable to exploits than alternatives, particularly Linux and Unix derivatives. OpenBSD being the most preemptively secure, in part by digging deep into infrastructure (classic example: string handling to avoid buffer overruns, and an entire huge class of security blunders). There's a humorous bit about various Linux, BSD, and Microsoft responses to security disclosures that's pretty close to truthful (sorry, can't dig it up right now). Nick Petreley's "Security Report: Windows vs Linux: An independent assessment" remains largely valid http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_windows_vs_linux/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_wind...
- kyberias 14y ago
  I still don't see any _fundamental_ difference on the points you make between Windows and Linux: monolithic design due to performance considerations, both have bugs, etc.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    A given bug in a GNU/Linux distro tends to affect a single piece of software which any given user may or may not have installed, may or may not be using, and/or may or may not be using in a way that exposes them to the vulnerability. There are classes of bugs for which this is not true, mostly affecting the kernel itself, but these are fairly rare. Bugs affecting Windows frequently exploit features which are deep and broad, have profound systemic effects, or are easily exploitable on large classes of systems. The Sapphire/Slammer worm comes to mind -- you wouldn't think that the Microsoft SQL Server would be a widely installed desktop component, but as the Desktop Engine, it was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer Other factors affecting this: With Linux, I have one-stop shopping for most of my security updates affecting virtually ALL software on my system. Updates are atomic, can generally be applied without rebooting, and (due to nearly two decades of process improvement and strong policy) nearly always work. There are differences even among distros -- I find Debian tends to have the most robust practices, so long as you stick with stable, RHEL is a lot more hit-or-miss. This is a direct consequence of Debian Policy. Read it and understand it. Linux software components tend to do one thing and one thing well. Rather than ship kitchen-sink "Enterprise Solutions", most Linux software and subsystems focus on a single task, are principally controlled and configured via commandlines and textfiles (lending themselves to scripting, version control, and configuration management generally, hence, better and more consistent processes). Again, not uniformly true, with GNOME (not a server package) and Systemd being notable exceptions. There's an unprecedented level of transparency. Even as a mostly shell-tools kind of sysadmin, I can directly monitor system state through shell tools, strace, and /proc. Even finding myself on Linux-like environments (e.g.: Mac OS X, Solaris) lacking all of these features, I feel their absence profoundly. There's little about a process or system I can't examine directly and/or log. There's more out there. If you're not willing to be convinced, there's little I can say or show you that will change your mind. But you're more than free to do your own legwork.
javert 14y ago
They're all fundamentally insecure, because they are designed around the notion that we trust certain users and not others, instead of the notion that we trust certain code and not other code, depening on what it wants to do.

From the article about Windows: "it’s simply and fundamentally insecure". How is it fundamentally insecure exactly?

brudgers 14y ago

By popular perception.

calinet6 14y ago
As well as actual reality.

dredmorbius 14y ago

There have been a number of articles / studies on this, the ones I'm largely familiar with in the early aughts / late 90s. It mostly boils down to fundamental architecture, monolithic design, UI decisions, conflating data + code (e.g.: a "Word Document" or "Spreadsheet File" is really a general-purpose computer program, not merely static text), and ingrained user practices (see today's PHP rant for a somewhat parallel discussion of culture), as well as an inherent lack of transparency, a filesystem model which prevents being able to delete in-use files, etc., etc., etc. It's a pile of small faults which, in total, create gross instabilities. Worse: the reasons for this are deeply linked to Microsoft's need to maintain a deep monpolistic lock on the personal computing sector. And as much as Microsoft continue to address small aspects, the big picture eludes them. Empirical data continue to show that Microsoft systems are far more vulnerable to exploits than alternatives, particularly Linux and Unix derivatives. OpenBSD being the most preemptively secure, in part by digging deep into infrastructure (classic example: string handling to avoid buffer overruns, and an entire huge class of security blunders). There's a humorous bit about various Linux, BSD, and Microsoft responses to security disclosures that's pretty close to truthful (sorry, can't dig it up right now). Nick Petreley's "Security Report: Windows vs Linux: An independent assessment" remains largely valid http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_windows_vs_linux/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_wind...

kyberias 14y ago
I still don't see any _fundamental_ difference on the points you make between Windows and Linux: monolithic design due to performance considerations, both have bugs, etc.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  A given bug in a GNU/Linux distro tends to affect a single piece of software which any given user may or may not have installed, may or may not be using, and/or may or may not be using in a way that exposes them to the vulnerability. There are classes of bugs for which this is not true, mostly affecting the kernel itself, but these are fairly rare. Bugs affecting Windows frequently exploit features which are deep and broad, have profound systemic effects, or are easily exploitable on large classes of systems. The Sapphire/Slammer worm comes to mind -- you wouldn't think that the Microsoft SQL Server would be a widely installed desktop component, but as the Desktop Engine, it was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer Other factors affecting this: With Linux, I have one-stop shopping for most of my security updates affecting virtually ALL software on my system. Updates are atomic, can generally be applied without rebooting, and (due to nearly two decades of process improvement and strong policy) nearly always work. There are differences even among distros -- I find Debian tends to have the most robust practices, so long as you stick with stable, RHEL is a lot more hit-or-miss. This is a direct consequence of Debian Policy. Read it and understand it. Linux software components tend to do one thing and one thing well. Rather than ship kitchen-sink "Enterprise Solutions", most Linux software and subsystems focus on a single task, are principally controlled and configured via commandlines and textfiles (lending themselves to scripting, version control, and configuration management generally, hence, better and more consistent processes). Again, not uniformly true, with GNOME (not a server package) and Systemd being notable exceptions. There's an unprecedented level of transparency. Even as a mostly shell-tools kind of sysadmin, I can directly monitor system state through shell tools, strace, and /proc. Even finding myself on Linux-like environments (e.g.: Mac OS X, Solaris) lacking all of these features, I feel their absence profoundly. There's little about a process or system I can't examine directly and/or log. There's more out there. If you're not willing to be convinced, there's little I can say or show you that will change your mind. But you're more than free to do your own legwork.

javert 14y ago

They're all fundamentally insecure, because they are designed around the notion that we trust certain users and not others, instead of the notion that we trust certain code and not other code, depening on what it wants to do.